{"pk":6864,"title":"Cohesion and Coherence in Children's Written English: Immersion and English-only Classes","subtitle":null,"abstract":"This study investigates the nature of cohesion, coherence, content, and grammar emergent in children 's essays, with a greater emphasis given to the understanding of cohesion and coherence. Conceptual definitions of these constructs are summarized based on prior research. The measurement of these constructs is operationalized into a picture-based narrative writing task for elicitation and scoring criteria for quantification. 192 first and second graders from an immersion program and English-only classes participated in the study. The analysis uses percentages, correlations, multiple regression, and qualitative analyses. Main findings include the following: (a) the measurement of cohesion and coherence can be operationalized; (b) referential and lexical cohesion correlate highly with the overall writing quality defined as the sum of the ratings of coherence, content, and grammar; (c) ellipses and substitution show a weak correlation with the overall writing quality; (d) lexical and referential cohesion are significant predictors of coherence while other types of cohesion are not; (e) dominant reference types are pronominal forms and proper nouns, and prominent types of conjunctive relation are temporal and additive; and (f) the most common error in cohesion is inaccurate reference. The substance and method of this study can provide a foundation for investigating subsequent topics with latent variables and different linguistic backgrounds and grade levels.","language":"en","license":null,"keywords":[{"word":"Applied Linguistics"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hb2z0s4","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jungok","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bae","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2010-07-22T03:00:00-04:00","date_accepted":"2010-07-22T03:00:00-04:00","date_published":"2001-06-30T03:00:00-04:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/ial/article/6864/galley/3963/download/"}]}